


Winter In the Depths Of the Bois Jacques

by entropynchaos (katonahottinroof)



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Episode: s01e06 Bastogne, Feelings, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Male Friendship, Yuletide 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 12:29:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8890744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katonahottinroof/pseuds/entropynchaos
Summary: It's midwinter in the Bois Jacques outside of Bastogne, and Dick Winters still can't keep from walking the line.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hellabaloo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellabaloo/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Hellabaloo! I was so happy to have a chance to work in Band of Brothers, so I hope this fic has managed to do what intended for it! Your prompts in your letter gave me quite a few ideas - it's perhaps not what you had in mind and certainly not what I had in mind when I sat down to start writing, but the boys and this story both seem to have a mind of their own... but I hope you enjoy it anyway! Wishing you all the best and many happy memories this festive period.
> 
> Now, to be honest, this could be read as gen or pre-slash, it's entirely up to you as the reader. Superpowers are mainly just hinted at, if you're not usually a fan of that particular flavour of alternate universe - they're really more background than not.
> 
> And, as always, no disrespect is meant to the veterans of the 506th PIR - this is based solely on the portrayals of the actors in the HBO miniseries.

Without the constant shelling, the whip-crack of rifles when the two sides venture within range of each other and the answering retorts from the men’s weapons – well, then the Bois Jacques might be considered to be almost pretty.

Dick walks the line every evening he can, moving among the men and going from foxhole to foxhole as he spreads a blanket of what little calm his already fraught mind can manage over each of them, leaching a little of the darker emotions from them as he goes.

He’s not ashamed to admit that maybe he concentrates his efforts a little more on Easy than the other companies in his charge – but Easy was his first and his connections to the men are brighter and stronger, forged as they were under Sobel’s harsh eye and in the hazy heat of Georgia, even with the replacements trickling into Easy to replace fallen Toccoa men, than they are with the men in Dog or Fox.

Dick, as Battalion XO, could be tucked up in a warm bed at the CP, as safe and snug as anyone could be in the middle of a country torn apart by war and sunk in the depths of one of the coldest winters he’s personally ever experienced. He should technically be kept safe back from the line with most of the other higher-ups in the area – and perhaps if he was one to listen to the higher ups and protocol more than necessary then he might just have done so. Dick, though, thinks that maybe he caught a glimpse of respect in Sink’s eye when the Colonel was last visiting the men in a whirlwind tour with his jeep... and no one but Lewis has so far complained about Dick being where he shouldn’t.

Nix thinks he’s mad for doing it, for risking hypothermia and influenza and death and everything else up to and including the plague – the other man expounds to the limits of his Yale-educated vocabulary on the subject out of sheer frustration, but then Nix still crawls into the foxhole beside Dick night after night anyway, the two of them shivering and curled into each other under too-thin blankets when Nix should, by all rights, be back at the CP as well. Wouldn’t do for the army to lose their best intelligence officer, Dick fondly mocks, often getting a petulant frown and a wave of exasperated warmth from Nix in return.

Lewis really doesn’t have a leg to stand on, Dick thinks fondly as he trudges through the snow, and his mouth quirks unbidden at the corner as he remembers the half-hearted grouching from the night before, the promises that when they get out of this mess they’d go to Palm Springs, Maui, Fiji... anywhere Nix could seemingly think of where the temperatures were consistently far above freezing.

He stops by a foxhole and crouches down, checks in with Eugene Jackson (far too young, they all know he lied about his age to get in, but his ability to see in the darkness has been a godsend in a wood where they don’t usually dare to light fires and the only light they can get is that which gets reflected off the snow) and Pat Christenson, makes sure they have enough ammo and reminds them to try to keep warm as they stare out across snow-covered fields towards the German lines. Christenson snorts at that, smirks up at Dick while Jackson promises to do so with all the earnest seriousness of the too-young trying to be older than their years. Dick nods, straightens and moves on, leaving them to huddle over Christenson’s flickering ball of warmth that he holds between them in his bare hands.

Dick wonders what the woods around and above Bastogne were like before war came to them. In a winter like now the area would still be shrouded with snow but it would lie crisp and clean and undisturbed save, perhaps, for the tracks of a few brave or foolhardy animals. Sheets of pure, unbroken white...

The calf-deep snow that Dick slogs through now is disturbed beyond doubt – flecked with dirt churned up by the men digging in, by the disturbance of the artillery splintering the tall pines and by the dull-red of dried blood from those unlucky enough to be caught up as a casualty.

He’s under no delusions that this war’s about anything other than luck, anymore. Why one man gets hit, why another doesn’t – he thinks back to Toccoa, to OCS before that, to the lectures they had on honing their skills in the field and their abilities for war, on the benefits of target practice and manoeuvres deep into the nights when he thought sometimes that he’d never been so cold, nor so tired. He knows now that even the coldest night in the depths of winter in Georgia (or even back in Pennsylvania) could never compare to this, that the longest nights of forced marches through countryside grown familiar would never exhaust him as much as the last few weeks have done. He wonders when he last had a full night’s sleep, undisturbed by explosions or his own constant shivering, tries to count back and finds he can’t.

“Sir?” Lipton says quietly and Dick blinks off his bleak mood to find himself by Lipton’s foxhole. Slightly off from the line, tonight, but still with Luz curled up under a threadbare blanket next to him. “Did you need something?”

“Just checking in, Lipton,” Dick returns and crouches down at the edge of the foxhole. The tip of Lipton’s nose is red, clearly visible even in the greyed out surroundings of night and the sergeant nods and flicks his gaze around the clearing he’s on the edge of, face raised slightly as he scents at the air. Dick thinks he’s probably counting foxholes – would be counting heads if they were poking up out of the snow, like Dick’s second-grade teacher used to do at the end of recess. Like Lipton’s done, if Dick stops and thinks about it, since they were back at Toccoa. “Anything?”

Anything. Such an innocuous word, but Dick’s well aware that there’s certain things that some of the men won’t even tell him, that he has to wait for the men to pass them up the chain of command, the complaints and gossip winding through the trees like smoke. What he really means is, is there anything you need to tell me? Anything worth mentioning that you’ve told (or tried to tell) your company commander that hasn’t been passed on? ...again?

Anything I need to know to get you all through this alive and in one piece and home as best I can?

Lipton shakes his head. “Nothing really, sir, except Toye’s missing his boots. Doc’s looking out for a pair and I’ve got the rest of them keeping an eye out too.”

“Missing...” Dick huffs a sigh. “Not sure I want to know how, Sergeant, but let me know if nothing’s turned up by first light, and Captain Nixon will...”

“See what he can do?” Lipton fills in with a quiet smile. Nix’s acquiring skills are legendary at this point, second only to what he’s actually paid to do with maps, compasses and the half-truths that come in from captured enemy soldiers. Dick grins back – he has no qualms about deploying Nix at his most charmingly urbane on which ever poor clerk’s in charge of the dwindling supplies back at CP, not on behalf of the men, even if it would be like sending a fully rigged out warship up against someone’s weekend fishing dinghy.

Dick rises back to his full height, stamps his feet a little to return some of the feeling to his toes, and moves on with a brief salute that Lipton returns before burrowing back into the warmth under the blanket he’s sharing with the sleeping Luz.

He finishes his rounds with his bare hands shoved into his armpits and flatly refuses to think of it as tucking the children in for the night as he wends his way back through the trees to home, if ‘home’ could be used to describe a shallow hole scratched out of frozen dirt. Home, tonight, appears to have acquired a battered tarp stretched over it as a roof. Dick pauses, staring at it, almost expecting to see a chimney poking out of the tarp with smoke curling up before he shakes himself out of a cold-induced hallucination.

“Honey, I’m home,” he whispers, ducking under the tarp and slipping into the foxhole.

“Like what I’ve done with the place?” Nix grins out at him, holding up a corner of the blanket he’s almost swaddled himself in so Dick can slide in next to him.

“I was just th-thinking a tarpaulin roof was wh-what was needed to spruce the p-place up,” Dick stutters, and Nix shifts, wrapping an arm around him and tucking the blanket tighter.

“Jesus, Dick, you’re freezing.”

“W-well, I d-don’t know if you’ve no-noticed, Lew, but it’s winter,” he retorts as he shamelessly curls closer, snuggling (for want of a better word) into Nix’s side and leaching from the relative warmth Nix is putting out.

“And here I was just about to go out to lie on the beach for a couple’a hours to work on my tan,” Nix snarks back, but he folds Dick’s hands in his anyway and rubs at them in a vain attempt to bring the circulation back to them and Dick finally relaxes, feeling the combination of worry, amusement and contentment that rolls in gentle waves off of Nix.

~*~*~*~

It starts like this.

Dick had come into his ability just after his sister Ann had been born. One minute, as his mother told the story, a young Dick Winters had been happily playing out in the yard and the next minute he had been sobbing fit to burst. He’d run into the house, straight past his startled mother, and straight upstairs to where Ann was supposed to have been napping in her crib. Little four-month-old Ann, however, had woken up and – finding herself both alone and hungry, and having managed to squirm out of her blankets – had started wailing at the top of her tiny lungs.

Edith Winters had followed her son into the room, scooping Ann up against her shoulder to hush her and reaching out her right hand to stroke it over Dick’s hair as he’d stood gulping for breath, tears still trailing down his cheeks and quite unsure about what was going on.

“Oh, my poor baby,” she’d crooned as she pulled him into her side, and Dick’s never been quite sure whether his mother had been talking to Ann or himself.

She and his father had sat him down later that evening and explained what being able to feel Ann’s babyish panic and hunger meant – emotional transference being one of those ability that worked both ways, his parents kept him home from school for the next week to let him settle, frequently (but gently) reminding him to rein in his feelings every time he got over-excited or upset.

“Not everyone can handle the emotions you have, honey,” Edith had told him, “you feel things so strongly that your mind just can’t help but share them. It’ll get easier as you grow up, though. It always does.”

Dick, being ten and therefore of the opinion that he was quite grown up already, had wrinkled his nose at the mention of feelings – he was quite sure that didn’t seem like anything he wanted a part in. Tommy Davis, down the road, had an older brother who’d said that that kind of stuff was for girls and people who read too many books. Dick liked books, he’d told his parents, but did the feelings really have to come along with them?

His parents had chuckled, and continued to praise him every time Dick learned to hold his emotions back, wrapped tightly inside him where they couldn’t reach out and hurt anyone.

He’d been the first in his class to come into his ability – Becky Saunders was the second, finding out that she could fly over one weekend, an ability that was much better than Dick’s own, in his humble opinion. He learned to keep himself quiet and restrained and under control, but ten-year-old children feel everything to such extremes that simply being at school was exhausting. Even his teachers, grownups though they were, seemed to forget to leash themselves around him.

So Dick grew up and he became known for his restraint – a model of self-discipline, his teachers said. He was friendly with almost his entire graduating class, although close friends with none of them. It wasn’t really a matter of concern for Dick, at that point. He’d been in World History when Iris and Pete had broken up back in middle school, the resounding emotions flooding from the both of them enough to cause him to have a nosebleed, and he’d been angry enough at Jimmy Hoyt in eighth grade to lose his precious control just enough that Jim still couldn’t meet Dick’s gaze. No, Dick often thought – better to keep himself to himself.

He’d switched his attention to sport, instead, reasoning that maybe it would be a good outlet for him, which worked wonders until he’d had to give up football and baseball in college to concentrate on his studies and hold down a job as well.

At that point, however, Dick was fully in control of his ability, just like his mother had told him he would be – a rationalisation that lasted through basic training at Camp Croft and even into OCS at Fort Benning where, at the age of twenty-three years, two months and a handful of days, Dick Winters met Lewis Nixon III.

~*~*~*~

Lewis hadn’t come into his ability until he was fifteen – and his father had never bothered to hide his disdain about it, calling Lewis a disappointment more than once in his younger years. Stanhope Nixon (heavily into his cups as always, as Lewis’ nanny had later muttered) had, a whisky-soaked laugh, remarked that of course young Lewis was a null, to their guests at a dinner party one night.

The boy had been coddled too much as a child, he’d said, to make anything sensible or useful of himself after all.

Lewis, nearly shaking with impotent fury and frustration, had stood by with his father’s hand resting heavily on his shoulder, keeping his eyes and his gaze fastened on his shiny polished shoes even as his father’s fingers dug in so painfully that the bruises lingered into the next week, because Lewis was newly twelve years old and embarrassed and fighting back tears that kept trying to spill down his cheeks. Almost everyone else his age had already come into their ability (to the varied joy or disappointment of their own families, depending on the type of ability they’d been gifted with) so that meant his father was probably right, and that hurt most of all.

He was, after all, used to disappointing his father, whether he meant to or not.

His mother, swathed in silks and fine wool and drifting in a cloud of French perfume, had gently pulled Lewis away from both his father’s grip and the party not five minutes later to deliver him to the care of his nanny and the relative safety of the nursery upstairs where Lewis ducked the old woman’s fussing over him – desperately trying to be the grown up he thought he should be, for surely then his father might not be so disappointed in him.

Blanche, who was truly precocious at nearly-seven, had stormed right through Lewis’ bad mood to tug him down with her onto the rug in front of the fireplace so they could play at war. She’d been waiting ever so long, she’d petulantly informed him, because hadn’t Lewis repeatedly told her not to touch his treasured tin soldiers when he wasn’t around to supervise? And Blanche had been _so patient, Lew, while you’ve been downstairs with all the boring people._

He’ll wonder in later years (when he’s at Yale, at war, when he starts drinking at sixteen and never really looks back) how much his father influenced how he turned out.

He tries not to think on it more than he has to, when it swims to the front of his mind like a creature form a swap staggering onto the banks to terrorise the population. Lewis Nixon isn’t one for introspection on a personal level. He knows the inside of his head’s all tangled up – so there’s no need to go poking about and making things worse, not when a stolen glass of his father’s whisky can dull the sharp edges.

Getting into other people’s heads, though – there’s an area in which Lewis soon finds he excels. He coasts through high school after his ability comes in, gets along exceedingly well with everyone he meets, especially when he figures out the hows and the whys of his ability, how to twist people’s minds so they’ll happily tell him everything and believe everything he says.

He cajoles answers from people – for homework, for the cheap thrill of someone looking at him without disappointment in their eyes, to get a shy smile from a pretty girl or coax a grin out of a sloe-eyed boy and flirts dreadfully without ever fully meaning it.

(Stanhope Nixon is gruffly pleased when Lewis comes into his ability, shocked when he realizes the extent of what Lewis can actually do, and by the time Lewis is eighteen, he can count on both hands the amount of times his father has willingly sat in the same room as him for over an hour since he was fifteen and still have fingers left over. He understands; his ability scares him too, sometimes.)

Blanche finds it all too hilarious, begging Lewis to use his ‘trick’ for her amusement while their mother smiles with grim satisfaction whenever her husband stalks out of the room. The fierce pride in Doris Nixon’s eyes almost manages to blot out the disappointment from his father that creeps and sidles in no matter how much whisky Lewis swills down.

He bounces around the world after high school – goes to visit Europe and the dance halls of Paris, the smoke-filled clubs of Berlin and he flees back across borders to America as nationalism rises in Germany. Santa Barbara University’s good for him – the sun turns his skin a golden brown and the warmth settles him a little.

It still feels like he’s looking for something.

Yale, then, in a last-ditch attempt to make his father proud. It doesn’t work, and it’s almost an embarrassing relief when war breaks out in Europe. Lewis enlists in 1941, dates Kathy, enters OCS, meets Richard Winters and proposes to Kathy.

One of these things stands out more than the others – he comes face-to-face with Dick on the first day at OCS and the only thought in his mind as his shakes Dick’s hand is;

_Oh. There you are. What took you so long?_

~*~*~*~

Morning dawns, its pale light filtering through the tall frozen trees and illuminating what had only been hinted at the night before. The woods in the morning no longer seem peaceful, although Dick’s roamed about the line often enough that he knows there’s always a measure of peace to be found somewhere.

Until the artillery comes, of course.

For now, though, Dick’s curled up with Nix under their tarpaulin. His mouth quirks at the corner, imagining that they must look something like a pair of kittens balled up together in their sleep. They’ve shifted closer in their sleep – Nix or himself, it no longer makes any difference – and their limbs are quite tangled together.

“Nix,” he murmurs quietly, trying to gently ease Nix into waking rather than force it on him.

The expanding awareness is like the sun that’s still slowly rising outside their little hidey-hole. Nix stirs, mumbles something that Dick only half-hears, and peers at him through slitted eyelids.

“Too early,” Nix complains and if his breath is stale, then it’s only to be expected – after all, none of them have had a chance to properly be clean since being shipped in to be surrounded for weeks on end in the woods.

“The war won’t wait for you, Nix,” Dicks says, slightly louder and forcing obnoxious cheer into his tone just to see Nix roll his eyes.

“Hell to the war,” the other man grumbles, but he starts to move anyway and Dick (just for a moment) feels an overwhelming, almost staggering, sense of loss as Nix pulls away. Nix blinks as the ripples of it trickle past him, and then falls back into Dick’s side, his fingers tugging at the coarse material of Dick’s uniform.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Dicks hastens to reassure him, but he’s so very tired of it all and Nix is leaning very close now.

“Of course you are,” Nix grins, the confidence in his voice reaching out and strengthening Dick’s resolve like a steel mesh wrapped around him. “Why, if anyone had asked me what would be the one thing I’d be absolutely certain of, stuck in the middle of some woods with snow covering everything the artillery doesn’t touch and facing a whole ravaging horde of Nazis across a field of ice...”

“Nix,” Dick says, and curses his pale skin as he feels the heat rise in his cheeks.

“... it’d be that Captain Richard Winters would be ‘fine’,” Nix finishes, and Dick pokes at his ribs causing Nix to squirm away.

“You’re incorrigible,” Dick mutters, and pushes up to knock the tarpaulin back – accidentally knocking some of the covering layer of snow that had fallen in the night onto Nix’s bare head.

“Must be my winning personality.”

Dick pauses on the edge of the fox hole and looks back at Nix, who shifts a little under the scrutiny as the moment stretches. “Must be,” Dick says finally, and heaves himself up and out to face another day.

Behind him, he can hear Nix cursing and flailing about with the tarpaulin as he tries to follow, and Dick grins to himself and rubs his hand over his chin.

A shave, he thinks, although the water will be ice-cold, and whatever’s currently passing for coffee. There’s the tread of a heavy army boot crunching into freshly fallen snow behind him, and Nix falls into step, their arms brushing each other as they move off side by side to face another day.

**Author's Note:**

> That's it, folks! Yuletide 2016, done and dusted! If you enjoyed, please feel free to leave a kudos or a comment - or both! Both is good... but no pressure.
> 
> As well, I give no permissions for this work to be uploaded in part or in its entirety to Good Reads or any such site.


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